This is interesting. What is amazing about the article is it is from NPR:
The U.S. and Russia have been taking lots of jabs at each other.
Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized President Obama’s plan for a military strike in Syria, and the Russian leader then denounced American “exceptionalism” in a biting op-ed in The New York Times.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., fired back Thursday with his own op-ed in the Russian paper Pravda, entitled, “Russia Deserves Better Than Putin.”
Even Monday’s shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, in which a gunmen killed 12 people, has become part of the feud.
Alexei Pushkov, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s parliament, used the shooting to mock the United States as it was happening.
“A new shootout at Navy headquarters in Washington — a lone gunman and seven corpses. Nobody’s even surprised anymore. A clear confirmation of American exceptionalism,” Puskoy tweeted.
But while Pushkov sneers at U.S. gun laws, how do the stats look in Russia?
According to Gunpolicy.org, Russians have far fewer guns than Americans — and far more homicides.
There are fewer than 13 million firearms in circulation in Russia, compared with an estimated 300 million in the United States. That works out to about 9 guns per 100 people in Russia and closed to 100 guns per 100 people in America.
The most recent homicide statistics for Russia show that there were 21,603 killings in 2009.
According to the FBI, the United States had 13,636 homicides in 2009 with a population that is more than twice as large. More than 80 percent of those killings were gun-related.
It’s difficult to make a direct comparison of gun homicides in the two countries because Russia doesn’t break down its murder statistics
More guns equlas less crime. Even NPR can’t deny the statistics. What they don;t point out is that half of America’s murders are done by young, black males, who are only about 6% of the population. If you could get the black homicide rate down to merely double that of whites, America with all her guns would have a lower homicide rate than almost any of the strictly controlled (and thius unfree) nations of Europe. Think abou tthat for a moment. The black homicide rate is an extremely daunting fact. Why are young black men so unifiormly violent? All in all, this article was pretty even handed to come from NPR. We have in America nacent totalitarians who want to disarm the citizenry, but we have fewer murders than Russia, which has very strict gun laws. This is not propagnada for increasing America’s gun control laws. From NPR, that is a surprise.
Tags: gun control, NPR
